Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Google Slides: Learning Journals

As educators, we all know that reflection is important. John Dewey said, “We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.” It is often difficult to plan time in our busy semesters for this much needed reflection. Google Slides can help. Whether it is some sort of a daily or weekly learning journal, reflections on labs or projects, or even reflections for each assignment or chapter, you and your students can use Google Slides to make this process easy and organized.

Students can create a slide presentation at the beginning of the semester. They will use the same file all the way through. Each slide becomes one entry in the learning journal. One day, one assignment, one project, one chapter, etc. The important thing is to have them date the slides and always keep the most recent slide at the top. Students can add a new slide and then click on it and drag it to the top to make it slide #1. This way, when you are looking over their work, the most recent one is always at the top and you don't have to scroll through all the slides to find it. The size of the slides can be changed to make them larger if your students need to write longer reflections. You can even make them 8.5 x 11! Check this post to see how.

You can see a very simple example of a Student Learning Journal created using Google Slides here.

Sometimes we forget that the process is more important than the product. Building this simple task into your class time or homework routine can ensure that students always take time for reflection.